Throughout the exchange I have stressed the positive elements embedded in any such debate and I still want to retain that ethos of the critique. Indeed, from the new social media of blogging, one future option might be a return to the old media of the past and wrap the debate as it stands into journal form, supplemented with additional extended essays from each of us. For the present, though, my aim is to take issue with a number of points raised in the last round contained within Beasley-Murray’s ‘Not nearly far enough’ post.

This is the fifth contribution in the series Thesis Piecesfeatured on For the Desk Drawer written by my past and present doctoral students. This contribution from Cemal Burak Tansel starts with a focus on the discontent with global capitalism from the perspective of the alter-globalisation movement. He then moves on to explore the development of capitalism itself with a call to move beyond Eurocentric visions of modernity.

The spectre of a radical social revolution is still haunting the world two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and much to the dismay of those who have far too eagerly proclaimed the end of history. From austerity-struck, inequality-ridden ‘developed’ countries to the Global South wherein a vicious cycle of developmental catch-up has been implemented via colonialism, imperialism and brutal capitalist competition, the twenty-first century world map is riddled with incipient, yet markedly vivacious moments of such upheavals. Despite differences in the specific historical, social and political backgrounds from which they emerge, a common theme that crosscuts the recent wave of mass mobilisations and popular struggles is an unmanageable discontent with global capitalism. Recall the various currents of the alter-globalisation movement, peasant and indigenous struggles in Latin America and East Asia, anti-austerity protests and occupations in Syntagma, Puerta del Sol or ‘repossession by occupations’ in the US. Thus it is not unsurprising that we are witnessing a proliferationofdebates revolving around the seemingly difficult question of how to envision a ‘life after capitalism’.

I welcome Jon Beasley-Murray’s reply, ‘A bit of a leap’, to my rejoinder ‘Machiavelli, Gramsci, Althusser and Us’ that is centred around his blog post ‘Machiavelli and Us’. Through these engagements clarity may come to the fore as well as new moments of rupture that can open up politics afresh. In response, my initial aim is to rectify certain errors in Beasley-Murray’s representation of the debate. More substantively, my aim is to reaffirm precisely how both Beasley-Murray’s reading of Althusser and Gramsci is problematic in his original blog post and in his book Posthegemony, which received an Honorable Mention for the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize.

Deriving from course notes and draft texts, Louis Althusser’s Machiavelli and Us has not perhaps attracted as much attention as it deserves given the rich re-readings it delivers not only of Machiavelli but also Gramsci. Recently, though, Jon Beasley-Murray released a blog post, also entitled ‘Machiavelli and Us’, which delivers a fresh intervention. What does it offer?

There are strained nods to different interpretations of Althusser’s text. So it is accepted that Althusser’s book, ‘does its darnedest to present Machiavelli as a theorist of hegemony’. It is granted that, following Gramsci, Althusser affirms Machiavelli as a theorist of the fragmented process of state formation marking the Italian peninsula. But there is also a swiftness, a hasty shift of gear, an inattentive rush to quickly claim an alternative appropriation of Machiavelli, of Gramsci, and of Althusser. It is claimed that in Althusser ‘there is a posthegemonic reading of Machiavelli that is constantly escaping and perhaps threatening to overwhelm Althusser’s otherwise Gramscian insistence on hegemony’.

In the 1920s Victor Serge published a series of pamphlets on the Russian Revolution that together form a unity. These were (1) During the Civil War; (2) The Endangered City, that was a series of journal articles; and (3) The Anarchists and the Experience of the Russian Revolution. These essays were first translated by Ian Birchall and have been re-published by Haymarket Books as Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia, 1919-1921. They are invaluable documents in their own right but also act as a crucial supplement to Serge’s novels, poetry, correspondence, and memoirs, much of which have been covered in For the Desk Drawer.

These writings, though, start with the period of the ‘civil war’ in 1919, when the revolutionary workers’ state in Russia was under attack from fourteen states – including Britain, France, the United States, Canada, Czechoslovakia, and Japan – that all sent military forces to assist the anti-communist ‘White Army’. Petrograd, the frontline red city of the Russian Revolution, was the key spatial target during this struggle over territoriality. As Serge grasped, struggles over the city’s isotopies (its broad avenues, its canals, the voids of its squares, and its monuments) would equally define and shape its utopias (its projection of non-places in novels, poetry, and musical composition).